Chuck Yeager: Supersonic Man’s dogfight with India

Sept 20 2016

Rakesh Krishnan Simha

Chuck Yeager.

U.S. Air Force

Chuck Yeager, the first person to break the sound barrier, has become so obsessed in his hatred of India that he’s now saying Pakistan won the 1971 War. We examine the former American test pilot’s Indophobia and his reasons for being economical with the truth.

India won the 1971 War so decisively that even Pakistanis do not dispute that their defence forces capitulated in a matter of days. Over 93,000 Pakistan Army officers and soldiers were held for a year in Indian POW camps – cowering in fear from vengeful Bangladeshi mobs – and it remains the single most humiliating episode in Pakistan’s short history. And yet a decorated American general claims that Pakistan won that war.

Chuck Yeager, a WW II fighter pilot and the first person to travel faster than the speed of sound, is so besotted with Pakistan that he claimed in a tweet on September 8: “......Pakistan won. They are a sovereign nation. India did not annex them.”

Yeager’s claim was in response to former Indian Express editor Shekhar Gupta, who needled the former fighter pilot about his role in the 1971 War.

The American, who was deputed by the Pentagon to train Pakistan Air Force (PAF) pilots in the 1970s, continues his India bashing of the Cold War years. Cheered on by his Pakistani fanboys, he has been engaged in a Twitter war with those who contest his bizarre claim.

Several tweets were deferential to Yeager, addressing him as “sir” or “general”. Typical of Macaulayites, people like Gupta seemed to be almost sorry they were questioning a westerner: "Sorry, I touched a raw nerve, Gen. You're among the finest fighter pilots ever but sadly were on losing side in '71."

@Syednaa tweeted: "@GenChuckYeager sir with due respect, we lost East Pakistan in 1971 and saw it become Bangladesh. that was India's objective and it won, sir."

Yeager replied: "No, it was not. Its objective was to annex. One India again as it was before the Brits forced mass migrations."

However, this writer called him a “Cold War fossil” because who in his right mind would support Pakistan. Yeager’s association with a brutal regime makes him a “war criminal” too. Indeed, he has tarnished his own legacy by being part of a bunch of Americans who aided and abetted the Pakistani killing machine that killed 3,000,000 Bengalis. According to the New York Times, “This largely overlooked horror ranks among the darkest chapters in the entire Cold War.”

Intolerable hatred

So why has Yeager developed a visceral hatred for India and Indians? For that let’s revisit the 1971 War.

The 1971 India-Pakistan war didn’t turn out very well from America’s point of view. But for Yeager it went particularly bad. He was dispatched by the US government to train PAF pilots but ended up as target practice for the Indian Air Force (IAF), kicking up a diplomatic storm during a war situation.

Yeager’s presence in Pakistan was one of the surprises of the Cold War. In an article titled, "The Right Stuff in the Wrong Place", by Edward C. Ingraham, a former US diplomat in Pakistan, Yeager was head of the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) – a rather fanciful name for a bunch of thugs teaching other thugs how to fight.

In 1971, says Ingraham, Yeager arrived in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad to head MAAG. It wasn’t a terribly exciting job: “All that the chief of the advisory group had to do was to teach Pakistanis how to use American military equipment without killing themselves in the process.”

Among the perks Yeager enjoyed was a twin-engine Beechcraft, an airplane supplied by the Pentagon. It was his pride and joy and he often used the aircraft for transporting the US ambassador on fishing expeditions in Pakistan’s northwest mountains.

Yeager: Loyal Pakistani

Yeager may have been a celebrated American, but here’s what Ingraham says about his mindset: “We at the embassy were increasingly preoccupied with the deepening crisis (the Pakistan Army’s genocide in what is now Bangladesh). Meetings became more frequent and more tense. We were troubled by the complex questions that the conflict raised. No such doubts seemed to cross the mind of Chuck Yeager. I remember one occasion on which the ambassador asked Yeager for his assessment of how long the Pakistani forces in the East could withstand an all-out attack by India. "We could hold them off for maybe a month," he replied, "but beyond that we wouldn't have a chance without help from outside." It took the rest of us a moment to fathom what he was saying, not realizing at first that "we" was West Pakistan, not the United States."

Clearly, Yeager had no problems with the Pakistani killing machine which was mowing down on an average 10,000 Bengalis daily from 1970 to 1971.

After the meeting, Ingraham requested Yeager that he be a little more even-handed in his comments. Yeager gave him a withering glance. "Goddamn it, we're assigned to Pakistan,” he said. "What's wrong with being loyal?!”

Ingraham continues, "The dictator of Pakistan at the time, the one who had ordered the crackdown in the East, was a dim-witted general named Yahya Khan. Way over his head in events he couldn't begin to understand, Yahya took increasingly to brooding and drinking. In December of 1971, with Indian supplied guerrillas applying more pressure on his beleaguered forces, Yahya decided on a last, hopeless gesture of defiance. He ordered what was left of his armed forces to attack India directly from the West. His air force roared across the border on the afternoon of December 3 to bomb Indian air bases, while his army crashed into India’s defences on the Western frontier.”

Getting personal

Yeager’s hatred for the Indians was unconcealed. According to Ingraham, he spent the first hours of the war stalking the US embassy corridors, snarling curses at the Indians and assuring anyone who would listen that the Pakistan Army would be in New Delhi within a week. It was the morning after the first Pakistani airstrike that Yeager began to take the war with India personally.

On the eve of their attack, the Pakistanis, realising the inevitability of a massive Indian retaliation, evacuated their planes from airfields close to the Indian border and moved them to airfields near the Iranian border.

But no one seems to have warned Yeager.

Taking aim at Yeager

The thread of this story now passes on to former Admiral Arun Prakash. An aircraft carrier pilot with the Indian Navy in 1971, he was on deputation to the Indian Air Force when the war broke out.

Prakash presents a vivid account of his unexpected encounter with Yeager, in an article he wrote for Vayu Aerospace Review in 2007. As briefings for the first wave of retaliatory strikes on Pakistan were being conducted, Prakash had drawn a two-aircraft mission against the PAF base of Chaklala, located south east of Islamabad.

Flying in low under the radar, they climbed to 2000 feet as they neared the target. As Chaklala airfield came into view they scanned the runways for Pakistani fighters but were disappointed to see only two small planes. Dodging antiaircraft fire, Prakash blasted both to smithereens with 30mm cannon fire. One was Yeager's Beechcraft and the other was a Twin Otter used by Canadian UN forces.

Fishing in troubled waters

When Yeager discovered his plane was totalled, he rushed to the US embassy in Islamabad and started yelling like a deranged maniac. His voice resounding through the embassy, he said the Indian pilot not only knew exactly what he was doing but had been specifically instructed by the Indian PM to blast Yeager's plane. In his autobiography he later said that it was the “Indian way of giving Uncle Sam the finger”.

Yeager pressured the US embassy in Pakistan into sending a top priority cable to Washington that described the incident as a “deliberate affront to the American nation and recommended immediate countermeasures”. Basically Yeager was calling for American bombing of India, something that President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were already mulling.

But, says Ingraham: “I don't think we ever got an answer.” With the Russians on India’s side in the conflict, the American defence establishment had its hands full. Yeager was smaller than small; nobody had time for his antics.

However, Ingraham says there are clues Yeager played an active role in the war. A Pakistani businessman, son of a senior general, told him “excitedly that Yeager had moved into the air force base at Peshawar and was personally directing the grateful Pakistanis in deploying their fighter squadrons against the Indians. Another swore he had seen Yeager emerge from a just-landed jet fighter at the Peshawar base.

Later, in his autobiography, Yeager wrote a lot of nasty things about Indians, including downright lies about the IAF’s performance. Among the things he wrote was the air war lasted two weeks and the Pakistanis “kicked the Indians’ ass”, scoring a three-to-one kill ratio, knocking out 102 Russian-made Indian jets and losing 34 airplanes of their own.

Beyond the fog of war

The reality is that it took the IAF just over a week to achieve complete domination of the subcontinent’s skies. A measure of the IAF’s air supremacy was the million-man open air rallies held by the Indian Prime Minister in northern Indian cities, a week into the war. This couldn’t have been possible if Pakistani planes were still airborne.

Sure, the IAF did lose a slightly larger number of aircraft but this was mainly because the Indians were flying a broad range of missions. Take the six Sukhoi-7 squadrons that were inducted into the IAF just a few months before the war. From the morning of December 4 until the ceasefire on December 17, these hardy fighters were responsible for the bulk of attacks by day, flying nearly 1500 offensive sorties.

Pakistani propaganda, backed up by Yeager, had claimed 34 Sukhoi-7s destroyed, but in fact just 14 were lost. Perhaps the best rebuttal to Yeager’s lies is military historian Pushpindar Singh Chopra’s “A Whale of a Fighter". He says the plane’s losses were commensurate with the scale of effort, if not below it. “The Sukhoi-7 was said to have spawned a special breed of pilot, combat-hardened and confident of both his and his aircraft's prowess,” says Chopra.

Sorties were being launched at the unprecedented rate of six per pilot per day. Yeager himself admits “India flew numerous raids against Pakistani airfields with brand new Sukhoi-7 bombers being escorted in with MiG-21s”.

While Pakistani pilots were obsessed with aerial combat, IAF tactics were highly sophisticated in nature, involving bomber escorts, tactical recce, ground attack and dummy runs to divert Pakistani interceptors from the main targets. Plus, the IAF had to reckon with the dozens of modern aircraft being supplied to Pakistan by Muslim countries like Jordan, Turkey and the UAE.

Most missions flown by Indian pilots were conducted by day and at low level, with the pilots making repeated attacks on well defended targets. Indian aircraft flew into Pakistani skies thick with flak, virtually non-stop during the 14-day war. Many Bengali guerrillas later told the victorious Indian Army that it was the epic sight of battles fought over their skies by Indian air aces and the sight of Indian aircraft diving in on Pakistani positions that inspired them to fight.

Indeed, Indian historians like Chopra have painstakingly gathered the details of virtually every sortie undertaken by the IAF and PAF and have tabulated the losses and kills on both sides, to nail the outrageous lies that were peddled by the PAF and later gleefully published by western writers.

While few Pakistanis claim they won the 1971 War, many believe they won the air war because India lost more aircraft. Yeager was one of the several westerners military and media figures who backed and peddled these lies. Now it seems he wants to conflate the lie on the entire war.

Clearly, Yeager is no hero. He’s just a former fighter and test pilot who was strapped into an experimental aircraft that broke the sound barrier. It was a brave thing to do but a thousand other men or women could have volunteered for that mission. He did nothing extraordinary; the real heroes were the engineers at Bell Aircraft who built the Bell X-1 supersonic jet.

(This is an updated version of the article published in 2011.)

The opinion of the writer may not necessarily reflect the position of RIR or its staff.